Superbug threat as grave as climate change, say scientists

LONDON (Reuters) - Superbugs resistant to drugs pose a
serious worldwide threat and demand a response on the same scale
as efforts to combat climate change, infectious disease
specialists said on Thursday.

Warning that a world without effective antibiotics would be
"deadly," with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and
diabetes and organ transplants becoming impossible, the experts
said the international response had been far too weak.

"We have needed to take action against the development of
antimicrobial resistance for more than 20 years. Despite
repeated warnings, the international response has been feeble,"
said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical
charity.

The World Health Organization had missed opportunities to
take the lead, and very little progress had been made, he said,
resulting in the emergence of strains of infections, including
tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia and gonorrhea, that resist all
known drugs.

"We need a new independent body that will not only monitor
the spread of antimicrobial resistance, but also drive and
direct efforts to contain it," he told reporters at a briefing
in London.

Such a body should be modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) and work with governments and agencies
who would implement its recommendations, Farrar said in a joint
commentary in the journal Nature with Mark Woolhouse of
Edinburgh University's Centre for Immunity, Infection and
Evolution.

"In many ways, antimicrobial resistance is similar to
climate change. Both are processes operating on a global scale
for which humans are largely responsible," Farrar and Woolhouse
wrote.

Asked at the briefing if he saw the threats as of a similar
magnitude, Woolhouse said "Yes."

Drug resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of
antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of
overcoming them. It has been a feature of medicine since
Alexander Fleming's discovery of the first antibiotic,
penicillin, in 1928.

RACE AGAINST TIME

Only a handful of new antibiotics have been developed and
brought to market in the past few decades, and it is a race
against time to find more as bacterial infections increasingly
evolve into superbugs resistant to even the most powerful
last-resort medicines reserved for extreme cases.

One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to
kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States - far
more than HIV and AIDS - and a similar number in Europe.

The WHO issued a report last month in which it said the
spread of deadly superbugs was no longer a prediction but was
happening right now across the world.

Woolhouse said the time had come "to stop re-stating the
problems ... and start taking action."

"We need independent, international leadership on this issue
before the massive health gains that have been made since
Alexander Fleming's discovery ... are lost forever," he said.

The IPCC is a United Nations body set up in 1988 to provide
a clear scientific view of the current state of climate change
and its potential environmental and social impacts.

Woolhouse and Farrar said their vision of a similar body on
antimicrobial resistance - which they dubbed the IPAMR or
Intergovernmental Panel on Antimicrobial Resistance - would
involve a broad range of experts, from specialists in clinical
and veterinary medicine, to epidemiologists, microbiologists,
pharmacologists, health economists and international lawyers.

"Creating an effective IPAMR will be a huge undertaking, but
the successful global campaign to eradicate smallpox, led by the
WHO, demonstrates that a coordinated international response to a
public health threat can work," they wrote in the Nature
commentary.